Dell PowerEdge RAID Controller S150 User's Guide

Dell PowerEdge RAID Controller S150 User's Guide

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NOTE: A NOTE indicates important information that helps you make better use of your product.

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CAUTION: A CAUTION indicates either potential damage to hardware or loss of data and tells you how to avoid the problem.

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WARNING: A WARNING indicates a potential for property damage, personal injury, or death.

Chapter 1: Overview.....6
PERC S150 specifications.....6
Supported operating systems.....9
Supported PowerEdge systems.....9
Supported physical disks.....10
Management applications for the PERC S150.....10

Chapter 2: Physical Disks.....11
Physical disk features.....11
Physical disk roaming.....11
Physical disk hot-swapping.....11
Physical disk power management.....11
Physical disk failure detection.....11
Mirror rebuilding.....12
Fault tolerance.....12
Self-monitoring and reporting technology.....12
Native Command Queuing.....12
NVMe PCIe SSD support.....12
Physical disk write cache policy for SATA drives.....13
Linux RAID.....14

Chapter 3: Virtual Disks.....15
Virtual disk features.....15
TRIM for SATA SSDs.....15
Disk initialization.....16
Background Array Scan.....16
Checkpointing.....16
Consistency check.....16
Background initialization.....16
Automatic virtual disk rebuild.....17
Virtual disk cache policies.....17
Virtual disk migration.....17
Migrating a virtual disk.....17
Expanding virtual disk capacity.....18

Chapter 4: Cabling the drives for the S150.....19
Disk connectivity for AHCI devices.....21

Chapter 5: BIOS Configuration Utility.....23
Entering the BIOS configuration utility.....23
Exiting the BIOS Configuration Utility.....24
Initializing the physical disks.....24
Converting to RAID disks.....24
Converting to Non-RAID disks.....24

Creating the virtual disks.....25
Selecting virtual disk sizes while creating a virtual disk.....25
Deleting the virtual disks.....25
Swapping two virtual disks.....26
Managing the hot spare disks.....26
Assigning the global hot spare disks.....26
Unassign hot spare disks.....26
Viewing the physical disks details.....27
Viewing the virtual disks details.....27
Rescan disks.....27
Controller Options.....27
Continue to boot.....28

Chapter 6: UEFI RAID configuration utility.....29
Entering the DELL PERC S150 Configuration Utility.....29
Exiting the DELL PERC S150 Configuration Utility.....29
Controller management.....30
Virtual disk management.....31
Physical disk management.....35

Chapter 7: Installing the drivers.....39
Pre-installation requirements.....39
Setting the SATA controller to RAID mode.....39
Setting the NVMe PCIe SSDs to RAID mode.....39
Creating a virtual disk.....40
Checking PERC S150 options and the boot list priority.....40
Creating the device driver media for Windows driver installation.....41
Downloading drivers for PERC S150 from the Dell support website for all operating systems.....41
Downloading drivers from the Dell Systems Service and Diagnostic Tools media for Windows.....41
Accessing ZP files.....42

Chapter 8: Troubleshooting your system.....43
Precautions for hot removal or hot insertion of NVMe drives.....43
Unable to configure Linux RAID using UEFI Configuration Utility.....43
Performance degradation after disabling SATA physical disk write cache policy.....44
Unable to modify any feature settings in UEFI or OPROM.....44
Extra reboot during OS installation.....44
OS installation failing on NVMe PCIe SSD with third-party driver.....44
Server performance is slow and crashes during OS installation on the SATA configuration.....44
Server performance is slow during OS installation on the NVMe configuration.....45
System startup issues.....45
System does not boot.....45
Controller mode is set incorrectly at system setup.....45
Boot mode, boot sequence, and/or boot sequence retry are set incorrectly.....45
Bootable virtual disk is in a failed state.....46
The boot order is incorrect for a bootable virtual disk.....46
A Non-RAID virtual disk is no longer in first position in the BIOS configuration utility list after a system reboot.....46
The BIOS configuration utility option does not display.....46

Configuring RAID using the ROM utility option is disabled.....46
Warning Messages.....46
WARNING - Found virtual disks that are degraded .....47
WARNING - Found virtual disks that are failed .....47
WARNING - Found virtual disks that are degraded and